OCCRA Update: Halloween Hoot, Waterford Kettering, and Road Rally

Written by AdamBot Student on October 30, 2013

The last few weeks have been very busy for the AdamBots. We have participated in another OCCRA competition, attended the Halloween Hoot cleanup outreach activity, held our annual team-building Road Rally, and more.

On Sunday, October 20th, we participated in the annual Halloween Hoot at Dinosaur Hill. We helped clean up after the Hoot by emptying luminaries and tying them up for next year, cleaning up  the trail, and organizing the sand box where the luminaries are placed. You can view pictures of the Hoot here. 

The week after was spent mostly in preparation for our competition on Thursday at Waterford Kettering High School. The Build Team worked on modifying and improving. We started adding a hanging system that, although mostly installed, is not currently functioning. We also continued to finalize the design of the rollers, test the shooter, and practice driving.

OCCRA Competition at Adams High School Recap

Written by AdamBot Student on October 22, 2013

This Saturday, October 19th, we participated in the first competition of the OCCRA season. The competition went very well, as we left with a second place finish and the Quality Award!

The competition took place at our home school of Adams, and we were honored to host the event. We arrived at school at 7:00am to help set up field and concessions stand, which was run by team parents throughout the day.  By the end of the day, after some students had joined us after taking the PSAT test, we had a total of about 90 students and parents there to cheer on the team.

This competition was our first glimpse of “Grid Lock” in action. While it was the first competition and we all were getting used to the game and the field, there was still some great competition…Read More

2013 OCCRA Build Season Recap

Written by AdamBot Student on October 18, 2013

The AdamBots have been back in school for over a month now and we have been hard at work in preparation for the upcoming OCCRA season, which starts tomorrow at our own Adams High School. Our engineering teams have been working for a few weeks now on our robot design and build for the competitions and non-engineering (now called “business”) teams have also been busy marketing, attending outreach events, brainstorming ideas for the FIRST season and much more.

Many new students have also joined the team and workshops have been available so they can get up to speed with the processes and techniques which make robotics tick. 

The OCCRA game for this season, “Grid Lock,” involves supersized tennis balls which the robots throw (or any other method they choose) into a 5×5 goal. Two teams compete and at the end of the game robots have the opportunity to hang on a bar in the middle of the field for bonus points. Our build teams used meetings early on in the build season to come up with a strategy and design for the robot.

Recently, the Build Team finalized our design and began building on top of a chassis that was previously built. This past week, the build team made a lot of progress. We started building the shooter and made angle braces to support it. On the rest of the robot, we put bands on the roller system to carry tennis balls to the shooter and added a jointed polycarb flap to allow pickup from both sides of the robot. From there, we finalized the shooter and the chain for the roller system…Read More